Sunday, May 22, 2016

Growing up in Auckland, I took passionfruit for granted. My parents always had a luxuriant vine. Not so in Wellington - last time I looked, they were $34.95 a kilo. But I have a very clever and generous friend with her own four vines. Last year they produced 800 fruit, and they're doing very well this year too.
For my birthday last week, I made Harvey's favourite: passionfruit jelly. He had discovered the recipe in Lois Daish's A Good Year, and always made it for his birthday. In his last year he asked me to make it for him. I'd seen passionfruit in Moore Wilson a few weeks earlier, but it seemed too soon to buy them. By the time I went back, there weren't any, and I've always felt guilty about disappointing him. So making it this year was a kind of expiation. It's a beautifully delicate dessert which needs no adornment at all.

Passionfruit jelly

Adapted very slightly from Lois Daish. Serves 4.

8 ripe passionfruit

1/2 cup sugar

2 cups water

1 tablespoon powered gelatine

- Halve the fruit and scoop out the pulp into a small saucepan. Add the sugar and water. Bring slowly to the boil and simmer for 5 minutes, until the sugar has dissolved and the passionfruit pulp has loosened from the seeds.

- Remove from the heat and sprinkle on the gelatine. Stir well until the gelatine has dissolved.

- Put a fine sieve over a bowl or, preferably, a small Pyrex measuring jug. Strain the mixture through the sieve to catch the seeds and any tough membranes.

- Either measure the liquid or see what it measures in the jug. If needed, add water to make the quantity up to 2 cups.

- Pour into a small crystal serving bowl, or individual small (preferably glass) bowls or parfait glasses. Leave to set overnight in a cool place. (If you're a bit pressed for time, cool it then set it in the fridge with a bit of clingwrap over it, so that no other fridge flavours intrude on it. If you do it in the fridge, remove a little before serving so it won't be too cold.) It will be a little cloudy, but that doesn't matter at all.

Sunday, May 1, 2016

For months my neighbour Frances has been talking nostalgically
about the roast sirloin of her childhood. So last week I finally got
organised to cook her one. We ordered it at the excellent Gipps St butcher, and
she came with me to pay for it and check that it was what she wanted.

I'd never
cooked a rolled sirloin roast before, and I don't think I'd ever eaten one. As
I wrote inThe Colour of Food, in
my childhood roast beef always meant "a round of chewy beef [probably
brisket] criss-crossed with wooden skewers and tied up with string". Only
in recent years did we start having roast fillet. So I was a bit nervous
about cooking this magnificent beast, aged for 18 days.

I took advice from the butcher and the internet, where I found very useful instructions from a London restaurant, and adapted them. To make sure it tasted as much as possible like Frances's childhood roast, I used salt only and seared the meat in dripping.

Rolled roast sirloin

1.Take roast out of
fridge at least 2 hours before cooking, so that it's at room temperature when it goes into the oven.

2.Pre-heat oven to 180C, fan cook.

3.Season well with garlic, thyme and salt.

4.Get a roasting pan smoking hot.

5.Sear in hot pan [with a little dripping to keep it old-school] until coloured all over. (2-3 mins
approx).

6.Place on oven tray in pre-heated oven. Turn oven down to 170C fan cook for desired time (see below).

The timing is always the trickiest bit. I usually like my beef rarish or medium rare, but in this case, I knew Frances would prefer medium, and of course sirloin is different from fillet.

Our sirloin weighed 2.1 kg. My meat thermometer gives an internal temperature of 71C for medium beef. It took about an hour and three-quarters to go a little over that, but the meat was still spurting reddish blood when I took the thermometer out. So I consulted with Frances's daughter, who came to dinner along with two other neighbours, and we agreed that it needed a little longer. I gave it 5 minutes more and that did the trick - it was about 77C by then.

It rested for half an hour, loosely covered in foil, while I made the Yorkshire puddings (recipe below). When I carved it (so easy with a rolled roast) it was exactly what I wanted: the inner slices a very pale pink, the outer ones perfect for Frances and others who preferred it medium.

She got the outside end, of course - as you can see, it was quite crusty and brown. When she took her first bite she said "Oh joy!" So I knew I'd got it right.

With it, courtesy of my other neighbours, we drank two bottles of beautiful 2008 Trinity Hill syrah which they'd given me a few years ago, and I'd kept for just such a worthy occasion.

Frances really appreciated the Yorkshire pudding, too. My first husband came from Yorkshire and his mother Marion taught me to make it properly, but I hadn't done it for years. Again, I found the perfect recipe, matching everything I remembered, on the internet - and I did use dripping. (Yes, I know it's bad for you, but once a year is not going to matter.) As this requires a high oven temperature, I made it at the end, after I took out the meat and veges (all very trad - potatoes, onions, carrots, broccoli).Yorkshire
puddings

1. Combine eggs, flour, milk, water, and salt in a medium bowl and whisk until a smooth batter is formed. Let batter rest at room temperature for at least 30 minutes. Alternatively, for best results, transfer to an airtight container and refrigerate batter overnight or for up to 3 days. Remove from refrigerator while you preheat the oven.

I made the batter the day before and put it into an empty soda bottle, allowing me to pour it easily into the muffin wells. It doesn't look like much, but it did 8 puddings and would have been enough for 9 or 10 less exuberant ones.

2. Adjust
oven rack to center position and preheat oven to 450°F (230°C). Divide drippings (or other
fat) evenly between two 8-inch cast iron or oven-safe non-stick skillets, two
6-well popover tins, one 12-well standard muffin tin, or one
24-well mini muffin tin. Preheat tins in the oven until the fat is smoking hot, about 10 minutes. (This is the crucial bit that I remember Marion teaching me.)

3. Transfer
the pans or tins to a heat-proof surface (such as an aluminum baking sheet on
your stovetop), and divide the batter evenly between every well (or between the
two pans if using pans). The wells should be filled between 1/2 and 3/4 of the
way up (if using large pans, they should be filled about 1/4 of the way up).

I used a 12-well muffin tin - this amount of batter makes about 9 or 10 puddings, but I overfilled my tins a bit and made 8.

4. Immediately return tin to oven. Bake until the Yorkshire puddings have just about quadrupled in
volume, are deep brown all over, crisp to the touch, and sound hollow when
tapped. Smaller ones will take about 15 minutes (popover or skillet-sized ones around 20-25 minutes).

4.
Serve immediately. (It
says you can cool them completely, transfer to a zipper-lock freezer bag, freeze
for up to 3 months, and reheat in a hot toaster oven before serving, but I
really don’t see
the point of doing that!)

Mine came out enormous and properly brown, but they did collapse more or less straight away (in the photo some have done that already) and were a little difficult to get out of the wells. It might have helped if I'd brushed the fat up the sides as well as putting it in the bottom. But it didn't matter - they were the Real Thing, especially when covered in dark brown gravy.

What I had for dinner - a real-life list of everyday food

The last of my Sharwood's Tandoori Spice with chicken thighs - you mix it with yoghurt, vinegar, lemon juice and oil to make the marinade, then bake the chicken and serve with rice and salad. Otherwise, classic schnitzel with Austrian potato salad (recipe coming soon), leftover bits of schnitzel with easy tomato pasta sauce with a hint of chili on fettucine. For Frances's 92nd birthday, a gorgeous beef fillet (her shout) with baked grated potato cake (see recipe labels list) and veges, then at her request, classic apple crumble. We're eating up the last scraps tonight.

Quite a good run lately. Ready-cooked chook instant "roast" with baked veges on Thursday, potato and vege curry with bits of leftover chicken on Friday, pea and ham soup on Saturday, terakihi in a chili crumb coating with leftover curry and brown rice tonight.

Pride goes before a fall - all very well to boast about dinner parties, but lately it's been much less exciting. A pretty slapdash parade of dinners. Chicken curry for three nights (I made a big one on purpose), interspersed with quick basic fish-in-microwave (1 minute for terakihi) and other basic no-brainers like home-made pizza and bacon and egg pie. But for tonight there's a beef casserole in the slow cooker - that should do two dinners, though with Jonathan I might well be wrong about that. Well, he is 6ft 2in.

I don't mean to boast at all, but I had three three-course dinner parties the week before last. They all worked very well. See lemon tart and cheesecake posts. The other nights we lived very well on the leftovers.

Sunday: Terakihi, sald and potatoes.

Saturday: Chicken bolognese - I'll put up the recipe next week.

Sun 24: Courgette and potato fritters, bacon, red cabbage salad.

THE COLOUR OF FOOD

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